Yesterday's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco was all about the 3G iPhone, but that doesn't mean Apple wasn't willing to offer a bit of OS X-centric news as well. Following Steve Jobs' keynote address at WWDC '08, the company offered a preview of "Snow Leopard," the next major version of its Mac OS X operating system.
Unlike past iterations, however, the new version won't focus on new features but rather on enhancing performance, reliability and laying the foundation for future features. According to the press release, Snow Leopard will be optimized for multi-core processors with a new technology dubbed Grand Central, be able to tap into the computing power of modern graphic processing units (GPUs), support up to a whopping 16TB of RAM, and provide out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 in Mail, iCal, and Address Book.
In addition, Snow Leopard will include QuickTime X, a revised and optimized version of Apple's media technology. Apple is not saying yet how much Mac OS X Snow Leopard will cost, but the company did say it expects to ship 10.6 "in about a year."